Thoughtful Learning Blog

Insightful articles about 21st century skills, inquiry, project-based learning, media literacy, and education reform.

5 Questions to Analyze Any Communication

Submitted by King on Fri, 2014-02-14 12:05

Communication is complex. Students need to be able to write to different audiences. They need to create an appropriate voice for each topic and purpose. They need to understand how to get their point across in a larger context. All of this complexity can be bewildering. When I help students analyze communication situations, I use a simple graphic:

Communication Situation Graphic

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Deeper Thinking for the Common Core

Submitted by King on Wed, 2014-01-22 15:24

The Common Core State Standards require students to think more deeply in all classes. But what counts for deeper thinking? Bloom’s revised taxonomy lists thinking skills in order from superficial to deep:

Bloom's Revised Taxonomy List

For many years, we’ve done well teaching and testing the top half of the taxonomy. After all, multiple-choice, true-false, and fill-in-the-blank items do an excellent job of measuring what students remember, understand, and can apply. On the other hand, they don’t easily measure what students can analyze, evaluate, or synthesize. What is tested is taught, so our inability to test these skills has meant that they were not getting taught.

However, the new assessments for the Common Core will test the full range of skills required. These tests combine new strategies, interactive environments, simulated research situations, and good-old essay responses in order to assess how well students can analyze, evaluate, and synthesize. Of course, now that these skills will be tested, they must be taught.

How can I teach analyzing and evaluating?

Start by teaching thinking strategies. One strategy that most educators already know is using graphic organizers to stimulate thinking:

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Helping Students Be Awesome

Submitted by King on Thu, 2013-12-19 13:00

My friend Oliver Schinkten knows 150 awesome human beings. They’re students in his Communities and leadership classrooms at Oshkosh North High School, and they routinely do amazing things.

Last year, each student in Communities found and interviewed a local veteran of World War II, the Vietnam War, or the Korean War. They prepared questions, conducted and recorded hour-long interviews, edited them into stories, and created keepsake DVDs for the veterans and their families. The students then planned and ran an event celebrating the service of these people and presenting them with the DVDs. Afterward, many families contacted Oliver to tell them how moving and powerful the experience was, and how the DVD was a priceless heirloom they would pass down for generations.

Pretty awesome stuff for high schoolers.

Or how about the hydroponics lab that the students are building? It isn’t just a 48-foot long hoop house that will raise fish and fresh vegetables around the year to be used in the cafeteria and sold locally. It’s also a STEM Learning Center, creating a living lab for students from Oshkosh North and offering educational tours to school groups from around the area.

And it’s being funded, designed, built, and staffed by high school students.

People often assume that Oliver is teaching a gifted class, but he has public-school students from all different backgrounds, with a variety of historic levels of achievement. He says that the difference is authenticity. When students realize that what they are doing matters and is real, they engage, and the results speak for themselves.

During the 2012 election campaign, the Communities classroom created a non-partisan Web site that factually reported on the many issues in that divisive campaign. Read more

Shifting to the Common Core

Submitted by King on Wed, 2013-10-16 13:36
Shifting to the Common Core

For most educators, the Common Core is a reality. The question is what to do about it. How can we shift from what we have been doing to what we are required to do?

Many groups have created lists of ways that the Common Core differs from previous sets of standards. These differences, or “shifts,” provide educators a focus as they rework and redirect their approach.

“We hear from educators across the country that understanding the Shifts makes their lives easier by clarifying the key changes required by the Standards.”

—Achieve the Core

Some groups advocate six shifts for each content area, while others present just three. Regardless of the number of shifts or the exact wording, most groups present a list like the one that follows, from AchievetheCore.org:

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100 Guiding Questions for Summer

Submitted by King on Tue, 2012-07-03 09:08
Sun Glasses

If you teach in an inquiry- or project-based classroom, you probably use guiding questions to help your students really dig into a topic. Well, now that summer is officially upon us, it's time to consider what questions will guide your summer and help you really dig in. Here's a list of 100 guiding questions that can help you get the most out of this season. Pick a question from the list, or let the ideas here inspire you to fashion your own. Then get busy with your summer of inquiry!

  1. What self-improvement should I do this summer?
  2. What positive health habit can I adopt?
  3. What is my most negative health habit, and how can I end it?
  4. What is my biggest physical complaint, and how can I get rid of it?
  5. How can I get outside more?
  6. What activity can I do with friends?
  7. What preventive care should I do this summer?
  8. How can I improve my attitude and outlook?
  9. How can I become happier?
  10. What part of my personality would I most like to change, and how?
  11. How can I better manage stress and anxiety?
  12. What self-talk do I do, and how can I make it more positive?
  13. How can I improve my energy and strength?
  14. What new hairstyle should I try?
  15. What shift in fashion would make me feel better about myself?
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Help Students Clear the Way for Critical Thinking

Submitted by King on Fri, 2012-05-25 08:13

In order to get students to think critically, you need to help them break through their mechanical thinking and manage their emotional thinking.

What is mechanical thinking?

When students think mechanically, their brains are just repeating looped recordings of thought without considering them. For example, students might have the mechanical thought, “I'm not good at math.” It just crops up in their brains whenever they look at a math problem. Often that little mechanical loop doesn't even relate to reality.

Why do we think mechanically?

Group Expectations

Mechanical thinking is useful for routine tasks like walking, riding a bike, keyboarding, driving, playing an instrument, and other activities that have become part of muscle memory. To learn any of these skills takes a lot of critical thinking, problem solving, and practice, but once the skill is learned, it is stored in the cerebellum at the base of the brain. Often a person can do something with great ease but can't explain how to do it to anyone else. The skill is no longer conscious. But to learn new skills, students need to think critically.

How can students break through mechanical thinking?

When students are thinking mechanically about a topic in school, they are recalling old ideas about it and are not engaging the material in a new way. Most often, mechanical thoughts manifest themselves in statements that shut down possibility. You can teach students to recognize such statements, stop them, and replace them with questions that open up possibilities:

Mechanical Thinking

(statements that stop thought)

Critical Thinking

(questions that start thought)
“I'm not good at math.” “How can I improve my math skills?”
“That's not the way Mrs. Jones taught us.” “How many ways are there to do this?”
“There was only one reason for the Civil War.” “What different factors led to the Civil War?”
“Current Events is boring.” “How do events right now shape my future?”
“Our group never accomplishes anything.” “Why is our group getting hung up?”
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